


The Center Cannot Hold

by Kieron_ODuibhir



Category: Batman (Comics), Batman - All Media Types, DCU, Nightwing (Comics)
Genre: Angst, Drinking, Emetophobia, Families of Choice, Family, Fluff, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Storytime, albeit awkward, an unusual amount of nu52 stuff canon, and the prompt was for angst, because they put dick through the wringer, bruce wayne is a dad, oblique reference to canon brainwashing, oblique reference to canon sexual assault, reference to court of owls' slavekeeping practices, robin boy hostage, that's a warning for those who have it not a feature of the fic, tim drake is a good bro
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-12
Updated: 2018-12-12
Packaged: 2019-09-13 10:33:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,978
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16890921
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kieron_ODuibhir/pseuds/Kieron_ODuibhir
Summary: Every so often, it all catches up with him.





	The Center Cannot Hold

**Author's Note:**

  * For [spread_my_wings](https://archiveofourown.org/users/spread_my_wings/gifts).



> Dick Grayson angst & h/c for fuyunoakegata as part of cerusee‘s [gofundme](https://www.gofundme.com/help-cerusee-recover=%22nofollow%22) prompt drive! Twice as long as it should be because that’s Who I Am and it would be much more work to edit it down again and who wants that?
> 
> Crossposted from tumblr.

Dick spat a final time to get the last of the bile out of his mouth. He was just glad Damian had slept through him staggering upstairs and being a general embarrassment to everyone who had made the colossal error in judgment to agree to be legally related to him.

Though technically Damian hadn’t gotten any choice, not on the legal side of things, and neither had Jason or Cass because despite Dick having turned up first, he’d been adopted later than either.

It was weird how much of a difference making things official seemed to make. It was just paperwork.

Getting married was technically just paperwork too, and he’d expected _that_ to change everything. Enough he’d rushed toward it, and then run away. Paperwork and promises. He’d broken so many promises. He stared down into the depths of the toilet. He’d hadn’t chosen to break some of them. He hadn’t chosen to _make_ some of them.

“Dick?” The one person whose rest he _had_ disturbed on his way in had followed him up the hallway. He should have taken the time to close the bathroom door.

He stretched up to push the flush lever, one elbow on the toilet seat, then slumped back onto his heels and squinted resentfully up at the tasteful pattern of marble tile, reflecting back the dim motion-activated light over the sink. “I _hate_ being brainwashed. And mind controlled. And sold, and _handled_ without asking, and…being a _thing_ for people to _have._ ”

Dick drew the back of his wrist over his mouth. You’d think with his talents and experience he’d have learned to lose his stomach lining with relative grace and panache.

Maybe he had; he had a great record for containing the mess. It was just a gross activity. Some things you just couldn’t do _well._

Tim wavered in the doorway. “Did somebody.” He sounded halfway between squeaking in horror and growling with intent to go out and turn over every bar in Gotham to get vengeance, which resulted in a tone that would have made Dick want to laugh in any other mood.

He slumped onto his butt and continued to list against the toilet. Good toilet. Porcelain friend. Not even stinky or grimy at all from any angle, besides what he’d just done to it, because Alfred secretly employed an army of cleaning pixies or something. “Guh. No. I’m just drunk. Don’t listen to me, I’ve just been drinking.”

Drinking and thinking. Hard to say which was the stupider activity, sometimes. Why had he come back to the house. He wasn’t trying to pay his own way through the world anymore, he could have dropped a few hundred dollars on a hotel room without a second thought.

Tim padded into the room, ran water for a few seconds. Brought him a damp washcloth. “Here.” Dick sponged half-heartedly at his mouth and then his arm. They’d both had worse things on them than traces of vomit.

He’d given up by the time Tim came back, this time with a cup of tap water. “Here,” little brother said again, handing it over. It was only half full, which was good because Dick’s hand shook as he managed to swish a sip around his mouth and spit out some of the bitter acid taste into the toilet.

He closed his eyes in shame. He could make the shaking stop, if he really had to. He’d been trained. Not that long ago he’d never have let Tim see him like this. But Tim was an adult now. His _peer_ , right? It wasn’t like any force in the universe had ever restrained his meddling tendencies for long anyway, let alone Dick. Tim was just another one of the people always _pushing_ , always trying to make him _be_ something _for_ them, match up to the picture in their heads, and he was so tired.

“Uh, here,” said Tim for the third time, and rescued the water and entirely forgotten washcloth from Dick’s hands before they could slide to the floor. “Can I?”

Dick opened his eyes to see his little brother squatting awkwardly in front of him, the washcloth folded to put the used surface on the inside, half-raised toward his cheek. Oh. He let his head drop forward a little and hummed in assent, and with his eyes closed again felt Tim daub carefully at the planes of his face. Where there must be puke backsplatter he hadn’t even noticed.

“The Spyral hypnos are so stupid,” he complained, out loud—half by accident, half because if he didn’t volunteer _something_ Tim would obsess over reading into what he’d already said, and that would help neither of them. “Half the fights I had with them in, somebody hacked them against me. If you’ve gotta build an exploitable weakness into your people to trust them, you’ve already lost.”

The soft, nubbly texture of the washcloth, rapidly cooling to lukewarm, brushed over his right cheekbone and left it damp. He shivered, a little. Porcelain buddy toilet was getting less soothingly cool and more just chilly.

“Mm-hm,” Tim agreed. Dick wondered how much he knew. Surely not _everything_ —Vic had kept backups of the old Titans archives and made them available to the new team he’d mentored, so Tim _might_ know anything that had made it into a report, but he’d never gotten close enough with any of the old guard to get all the dirt. Kori wouldn’t have gossiped about their private business, he was pretty sure, if only because she’d never liked reliving old hurts.

Tim probably knew about Blood, though. He might know about Mirage. He might know…God. So much.

He’d seen Dick at his worst plenty of times before this. The illusion had to have broken. If he hadn’t given up on Dick yet, what could make him?

“You think you’re done in here?” What a tasteful way to ask that question, wow. Dick almost snorted.

He considered the state of his stomach. The roil had settled. He wasn’t actually sick, and he’d cleared out most of the undigested alcohol. The nausea with no physical cause was fading some, too. Toilet and Dick could safely part ways. He nodded.

“You want a hand to your room?”

Dick opened his eyes to see Tim was biting his lip. Tim had always been less handsy than the family tended to run, more like Alfred, but this amount of asking for permission was starting to get weird. Oh. Of course. Drunk idiot, you were complaining about people ignoring your boundaries, of _course_ he’d start fretting about the stupidest, least relevant part.

Was it written all over him, he’d wondered once, after the news about the Court of Owls had settled in. Was that why he kept being stolen, tampered with, claimed and pawed at? Why so many people seemed to think they could just _take_ him and it would stick? Was he just _meant_ to be owned. Bred for it. Ugh. No. Fuck that.

He didn’t need a hand to his room. He might have staggered a little on the stairs but that was mostly the general crappiness making him not _care_ where he put his feet. It took way worse than this to cost a Grayson his balance. “Sure,” he said. Put out a hand. Tim hauled him to his feet, and then stepped in to play crutch, like Dick had a leg out of commission instead of just being about one drink short of alcohol poisoning.

Tim was exactly the right height to make a good crutch. Dick draped his arm over his shoulders and got Tim’s around his back in response, and immediately felt better. More real. Maybe that was just the warmth. Tim’s hands got cold sometimes, his circulation wasn’t always great, but he was a _lot_ warmer than the toilet.

They lurched out into the hall, heading for the bedroom two doors down, only to be almost immediately arrested by a voice from the opposite direction.

“Dick…?” Bruce was in sweats, his hair damp; transparently fresh up from the Cave at four in the morning. At least Tim’s pajamas and cowlicks said he’d _gone_ to bed, even if he clearly hadn’t been _sleeping_. Like Dick could criticize. _He_ hadn’t even been being vaguely productive. Wasn’t it nice Gotham had both bars and taxis services that stayed open all night.

“He’s fine,” Tim was quick to answer for him. “Just under the weather. I was helping him get to bed.”

Bruce’s eyebrows were disbelieving, but the way his mouth pulled a second later wasn’t so much judgmental as anxious. “Can I help,” he asked after a moment.

Wow, two volunteers to help with a task that didn’t actually need any help at all.

“Yeah, sure,” he said, letting his voice slur a little so it was unclear how sarcastic he was being. “Tuck me in, read me a story.”

Bruce pursed his lips. His eyebrows went up. “What do you like to hear these days?” he asked.

Challenge apparently fucking _accepted_.

Bruce got him out of his boots and found him pajama pants to change into, while Tim fussed around adjusting the lights and fetching water and a vitamin supplement. Bemused, Dick handed Bruce a book off the shelf, consumed the pill and fluid, and let himself be tucked into bed. He blinked. Something was weird.

There was Bruce, settling in beside the bed and making a ruefully fond face at _The Prisoner of Zenda_ , which they’d read parts of together almost twenty years ago, when Bruce had been the one roughly the age of the narrator, instead of Dick. There was the cup, full of water again…. Aha.

“Tim,” he said.

His dumb little brother wavered in a second doorway. Dick patted the bed. Tim’s sudden smile was like the lights had been turned on again.

Dick drifted off to the rise and fall of Bruce’s voice as he began reading at the start of chapter five, when the action was already underway, and he could avoid making Dick stay awake laughing at the perfection of blithely useless aristocratic dilettante that was the main character, and the way Bruce read his dialogue in his Brucie voice with a plummy British accent.

He was warm, and the gross taste and the sick feeling were mostly gone, and he was going to regret his binge so badly tomorrow but for now he was still drunk and didn’t have to care.

Everything terrible was still true, but he had a father’s voice to set against it, didn’t he, and the pressure of a brother against his back, pinning the blankets down around him in a way that could have felt confining but only felt…safe.

And he was glad, now, that he’d told the cab driver _home_ and when asked where _home_ was directed him to the Manor.

These two, he reflected fuzzily, were the only ones who’d _made_ themselves his family, on purpose. Damian had _chosen_ him, in the end, which meant the world, and in a more limited way so had Jason, and Alfred, and so had lots of friends who were or had been like family.

But Bruce and Tim had knowingly signed paperwork that tied them to him. And as often as they fought, or disappeared, or ran away from each other, or were _presumed dead_ …no matter how much he let them down, no matter how much he wasn’t the person he wanted to be for them, or what they wanted…they were still there. In spite of everything, they’d decided on him and hadn’t moved on, even when he’d moved on from them. They were…still here. To come back to.

He really felt like he could almost believe they always would be.

That the net wasn’t going anywhere, and sometimes. Just sometimes. He could let himself fall.


End file.
